According to a report in the Telegraph, the prime minister recently met with firms including British Airways, BT and National Grid to discuss the plan.

Security minister Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones stated that the remit of the national cyber security hub at GCHQ will be broadened to allow it to analyse data from major communications, power and transport providers for evidence of hacking.

The report added that this proposed link with private critical infrastructure firms would swallow up the majority of the £650m funding announced last year by the government to combat the cyber threat.

It is thought that the plan has been at least partly prompted by fears of a large-scale Stuxnet-style attack on the UK's infrastructure. The Stuxnet worm was used to attack Iran's nuclear programme last year.

Sometimes, the power of the mainframe is the most cost effective answer. Computing's Peter Gothard puts Computing's readers' questions on the future of the mainframe to IBM's Z13 expert Steven Dickens.